Modernism and the Making of Masud Khan.

View/Open

Publisher

Metadata

Abstract

Masud Khan was one of the most controversial psychoanalysts of the post-war
period. This thesis argues that modernist literature and culture are central to
Khan’s conception and realisation of his psychoanalytic work in Britain from
the late nineteen forties onwards. His lifelong engagement with modernist art
and writing also shapes Khan’s vision of himself as a ‘self-exile’, and provides
the framework for his own imagining of contemporary political life in Europe,
Pakistan, and Britain. His psychoanalytic work, thoroughly shaped by the
writing of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and the painting of the cubists, is a complex
response to his own sense of his postcolonial modernity, and the rapid social
and political changes of the period. By taking Khan as a case study this project
explores the intersection of modernist writing and the end of Empire, especially
concerning questions of cosmopolitanism, exile, race, and the politics of
modernism. It aims to enrich our sense of the history modernism by exploration
of this highly idiosyncratic figure. The explicitly modernist bent of Khan’s
writing also opens up new readings of his psychoanalytic contemporaries
Donald Winnicott, Michael Balint, and Marion Milner that highlight the
continuity of their writings with many aspects of modernist culture.
More specifically, the study examines the shaping effect of specific ideas and
themes in modernist writing on Khan’s conception of subjectivity, whilst also
reflecting on the meaning of these translations of cultural life into
psychoanalytic theory. Explored are: Joyce’s articulations of ‘epiphany’ and
exile, as well as his writing on race and Jewishness; T.S. Eliot’s concept of
‘tradition’ and his writing on culture and community, especially as it allows
Khan to imagine his own ‘feudal’ past and ethnic distinctiveness in postwar
London; and the painting of Georges Braque and Joan Miró in Khan’s figuration
of new and radical forms of self-experience in psychic life.